Tom Rutledge is CEO and chairman of Stamford-based Charter Communications.

Tom Rutledge is CEO and chairman of Stamford-based Charter Communications.

Photo: Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg

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Charter profits spike after tax reform

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STAMFORD — Charter Communications’ profits for the past quarter and year soared as the telecommunications giant benefited from the tax law passed last month by Congress, according its latest earnings report released Friday.

Profits for the fourth quarter hit $9.6 billion, compared with $454 million in the same period in 2016. The bottom line for all of 2017 reached $9.9 billion, compared with $3.5 billion in 2016.

The massive increases reflected a gain of $9.3 billion tied to a reduction in the company’s deferred tax liability resulting from the tax reform.

Fourth-quarter revenues amounted to $10.6 billion, a 3 percent increase from the total in the same period in 2016. Full-year revenues came to $41.6 billion, a 43 percent increase over 2016.

The 2017 returns reflected the first calendar year of operations under the current version of Charter. In May 2016, the company acquired Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks for a total of about $65 billion, Those deals made Charter the second-largest cable carrier in the country after Philadelphia-based Comcast.

Charter Chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge described 2017 as a “transitional” year for the company.

“We accomplished our key goals of launching our pricing and packaging across our new company, and progressed as planned to unify our service delivery platform into a single entity from the multiple instances we inherited from our M&A transactions,” Rutledge said in a statement Friday. “In 2018, we remain focused on completing our service integration and launching new products to accelerate customer relationship, revenue and (adjusted earnings) growth.”

Charter now serves about a total of about 27.2 million residences and small and medium-sized businesses. Compared with the fourth quarter of 2016, its customer base in the past quarter grew by nearly 4 percent.

In the fourth quarter, the company’s number of video customers increased by 2,000. The internet customer base grew by 263,000, and the contingent of voice customers rose 22,000.

Among new initiatives, the company announced in December it had established 1 gigabit-per-second connections with its Spectrum Internet Gig service to seven markets covering about 8.8 million people.

The term “gig” refers to internet speeds of 1 gigabit per second. One gigabit equals 1,000 megabits. National internet speeds average about 9 megabits per second, by some measures.

As a sign of its growth, the company announced last October that it planned to relocate its Stamford headquarters from its current downtown base at 400 Atlantic St., to what would be a new 500,000-square-foot building at 406 Washington Blvd. Charter plans to make the move next year.

While it is growing, the company is dealing with opposition on some fronts. It still faces a strike of about 1,800 technicians in New York and New Jersey who are unhappy with the new contract terms that the company has offered.